Dropwizard ships with a https://www.dropwizard.io/en/latest/manual/migrations.html dropwizard-migrations bundle.The dropwizard-migrations module provides you with a wrapper for https://www.liquibase.org/ Liquibase database refactoring.The built-in bundle provides Dropwizard Commands, for a command line interface to run migrations. It does not provide a way to run migrations on application startup. That's where Liftwizard comes in.To run migrations with Dropwizard, you run a command like java -jar hello-world.jar db migrate helloworld.yml .To run migrations with Liftwizard, you run the usual server command, and Liftwizard will run migrations on startup.There are pros and cons of tying migrations to application startup. The main pros are that you don't have to remember to run migrations, and that they apply to embedded databases in tests. The main con is that migrations can take a long time, and you may not want to block application startup.To turn it on, add LiftwizardLiquibaseMigrationBundle to the list of registered bundles. java @Override public void initialize(Bootstrap<HelloWorldConfiguration> bootstrap) { // ... bootstrap.addBundle(new LiftwizardLiquibaseMigrationBundle()); // ... } Change the Configuration class to implement LiquibaseMigrationFactoryProvider . java public class HelloWorldConfiguration extends Configuration implements LiquibaseMigrationFactoryProvider // , ... other interfaces { // ... } Add a field with type LiquibaseMigrationFactory . private @Valid @NotNull LiquibaseMigrationFactory liquibaseMigrationFactory = new LiquibaseMigrationFactory(); Add the getter/setter required by the interface. @JsonProperty("liquibase") @Override public LiquibaseMigrationFactory getLiquibaseMigrationFactory() { return this.liquibaseMigrationFactory; } @JsonProperty("liquibase") public void setLiquibaseMigrationFactory(LiquibaseMigrationFactory liquibaseMigrationFactory) { this.liquibaseMigrationFactory = liquibaseMigrationFactory; } Configuration The LiftwizardLiquibaseMigrationBundle requires that you're already using database/named-data-source named data sources.Add a liquibase section to your configuration/json5-configuration json or yaml configuration. dataSourceMigrations is an array, to allow multiple migrations to different data sources.Each dataSourceMigration's dataSourceName must match a dataSource's name in the dataSources section.If no migrationFileName is specified, migrations.xml is the default. migrationFileLocation can be classpath or filesystem . classpath is the default. contexts are an array of Liquibase https://docs.liquibase.com/concepts/changelogs/attributes/contexts.html context tags.With this configuration in place, migrations will run on application startup.